


another city will be found (better than this)

by ambyr



Category: Palimpsest - Catherynne M. Valente
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, F/F, Grief, Rebirth, Self-Discovery, chosen families, cities as characters, picking the path of greatest resistance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 19:08:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambyr/pseuds/ambyr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adrift in New York City, Hester struggles to deal with Oleg's disappearance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	another city will be found (better than this)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ailelie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ailelie/gifts).



Hester could not escape the whispers. They found her in coffee shops and drugstores, came from a woman pressed so close to her on the subway that her breath tickled Hester's ear and from a man across the length of the park on a day when the breeze lifted her hair just so, exposing the mark on the back of her neck as carelessly as a child exposes the crawling centipedes beneath a rock.

_"Have you heard--?"_

_"--saw them on Subtrahend Street, walking arm in--"_

_"Did you know--?"_

_"A man told me--"_

_"Do you think--?"_

_"Maybe you and I could find it, if we--"_

She could not escape the whispers, the proffered business cards, the desperate pleas. But she could listen mutely, tuck them unread into the address book at the bottom of her drawer, and turn away.

She could refuse to believe that they were true.

She took to calling cabs instead of joining the mass of people on the subway, where the press of flesh against flesh reminded her of things she would rather pretend not to have known. It was a good plan, one she prided herself on, until a cab driver with skin the color of late-autumn oak leaves took her fare with a hand caged by a lattice of fine black lines.

Hester went back to the subway, knotting two scarves around her neck. Somehow, one always slipped free.

The whispers she heard in her sleep were harder to avoid. She had no pills left and was afraid of what she might do if she got more, of what her doctor might say if she showed him the empty bottles. She clutched one when she climbed into bed like a talisman, and woke from dreams of dying bamboo and Oleg's ghosts with its ridges branded into her palm.

She dreamed of Oleg, too. He stood shirtless in the square, staring up at her window, and called her name; lay still in his bed, so perfectly still, and looked at her through dead, accusing eyes.

"You're gone," she told dream-Oleg. "You didn't want me, you told me you didn't want me, and you left."

"You left first," he said, his eyes still lifeless.

"You only ever wanted your sister. You only ever wanted your city. I was just a path, a door."

They were in the square again, and he gazed at her earnestly. "Does a lock complain when a key opens it and passes through?"

"I'm not one of your locks. I'm a person, Oleg, a person. And you were never my key."

He shrugged, and she watched bones shift in his too-thin frame. "Every lock has a key, Hester. You should keep looking. I have thousands. Some I've never found the mate to, but I know one exists."

She wanted to answer him, but in the way of dreams he was gone before she could form the words, halfway across the square. The tattoo had vanished from his back, leaving her no map with which to follow.

The first time she woke from that dream, she found her fingers so tightly wrapped around the bottle that they had shed thin lines of blood. The second time, she felt the taste of vomit in her mouth and lay in bed shivering until the winter sun had cleared her narrow, east-facing window. The third time she rose and dressed in the pale pre-dawn shadows, binding a third scarf around her neck for luck or safety. She pulled Oleg's keys out of the drawer they shared with her address book and locked her own door behind her.

Her feet fell easily back into the rhythm of the old, remembered route. Three blocks west and one block north, and then an interminable wait for the meandering bus that led to Oleg's apartment. If only she saw him, then she would know: it was a dream, just a dream. There was no omen, no meaning, no way for the city to wend its way in when she refused it entrance. Oleg was still locked tight in his apartment, slowly wasting away.

She refused to think of the whispers, and where else he might be.

She tried not to think of how much longer he could last, left alone as he had been. Surely he had found it in himself to rise, to bring home coffee and eggs and day-old bread? She chewed her lip and doubled back a block to buy sausage and pretzels from the sleepy-eyed street vendor who had just set out his cart.

She clutched the grease-stained bag as she waited in the cold and thought about returning to her bed. She could ask the doctor for more pills. She imagined the stories she might tell him: I dropped them down the toilet when I was cleaning and watched them spin away into the sewers. The neighbor's crazy kid took them when she was over watering my forest of house-ferns.

I swallowed every one of them, and the man I loved held my hair while I choked them out, and then he never spoke with me again.

Easier, she thought, to board the bus and climb familiar steps to a familiar door.

"Oleg?" she asked softly as she pushed it open. No one answered.

The room was empty, painfully spartan, each dish placed neatly in the drain board, the chair pushed in at the table. In the bedroom, all traces of her last visit had been wiped away. In the workroom, locks and keys lay in endless ranks, paired by some system she could not understand.

She went back to the living room and sat in the chair, elbows on the table and head in her hands, and told herself he had only gone out for work. The food sitting on the table slowly cooled. When she picked up the bag to leave, it left a glistening ring on the spotless wood.

She went home and drank a cup of tea, then went to work late and tired. There were no dreams that night, or the night after. She should have been grateful. Instead, she found herself staring out her office window in hope of catching a glimpse of pale hair and bare shoulders. On the subways she twitched and turned, searching for a face she saw just beyond the corner of her eyes.

He was never there.

* * *

Hester made of it a pilgrimage. Every Saturday, she boarded the bus and watched the city slide slowly past her windows. The sleek glass towers ignored the bus, too occupied gossiping with the clouds. The brownstones looked down with maternal concern, tinged faintly with disapproval. The tenements stared hungrily through narrow, half-lidded windows. She stepped off there, at a benchless bus station whose back wall sparkled from a thousand tiny fractures surrounding a single bullet hole.

She walked three blocks, looking left and right and straight ahead, and then fumbled (always fumbled) for the key to the front door. The blade was as modern as one could hope, a serrated mountain range in miniature. It joined uneasily with the bow's arabesques of delicate brass filigree.

She had asked Oleg about that; he had shrugged, passing it off as the first key blank that came to hand. Perhaps it was. Whatever the truth, it served its purpose, clicking pins one by one into place until the door creaked open.

Inside the dimly lit foyer the building smelled of mildew and bleach and, faintly, of coriander. The single fluorescent bulb flickered, flaring briefly to show a worn but scrupulously clean rug before fading back into darkness. She climbed the stairs, one, two, three, four flights, turned left.

The second key was already in her hand. There was no mystery about this one; even the serrations were regular, flat, unexciting. She turned the knob, opened the door, stepped into the room. There was no one there.

By the third visit, her footsteps left a trail in the slowly accumulating dust.

On her fourth visit, the door was unlocked and open. The landlord stood squarely in the center of the splintering wooden frame, looking into the living room with its one table and one chair and one set of dishes in the drain board. His shoulders were tense.

Hester paid the rent, locked the door. Then she descended--one, two, three, four--and walked back to board the bus. She did not notice that the back wall of the bus shelter had shattered, leaving fragments strewn across the graying snowdrifts.

She got off well before her stop, changed lines, and continued on. At the police station, the officer listened with half an ear to her report, then shoved a stack of forms at her. Hester filled them in fastidiously, writing "Unknown" in rounded script over and over again until the letters blurred.

She didn't have a picture, and she was no artist for faces. But even the disinterested officer applauded the precision of her sketch of his tattoo.

* * *

Every month, Hester wrote a new rent check and slipped it between blue-white covers with all the care of a mother swaddling a new-born babe. The sickly sweet envelope glue left a bitter aftertaste on her tongue.

The dreams came and went. She paid the rent because it let her believe that the dreams were just dreams, that the police would find him, that he would some day come home. She pretended each check was a letter to Oleg, and murmured messages into the envelopes' deepest crevices. Sometimes they were angry--How dare you? How could you? Other times she pleaded: "I miss you. Come home."

Each time she pulled out her envelopes and stamps, she saw her address book crouched at the bottom of the drawer. Business cards angled out from every page like a phalanx of spears. Once or twice her fingers brushed their embossed surfaces before she jerked them back to the prosaic tasks of stamping and addressing, signing and sealing.

She knew she could not perform the ritual forever. Her bank account, once plump, began to shrivel like a fruit left too late on the vine. She paid the rent regardless. After two checks, the police called and told her they had traced Oleg to Italy.

She found hope in that, though the police officer seemed downcast. Her incantation was working. Italy was a real place, a place she had been once on a barely remembered vacation when she was a child. It was a place he might return from.

In the spring, the police found one final clue. They had evidence, the young man with an incongruous British accent said, that Oleg had left Italy for Japan. He explained, with much throat clearing and apologizing, that the trail had gone cold. There were no hotel rooms, no sightings, no train passes. Oleg had simply vanished. She answered his questions numbly, told him she knew of no connections Oleg had there.

When Hester settled the phone back on its cradle, her office was curiously quiet. She could hear, very faintly, the sharp staccato typing of her assistant, but the sound was distant and difficult to make out. Hester sat still for a moment, gripping the edge of her desk with white knuckles, as the silence crested and faded.

_Well_, she told herself, _that's it. They won't call again_.

She wrote the next rent check anyway, and got it safely sealed before her tears could make the ink bleed. Then she called her doctor and requested a new prescription.

The dreams vanished under the pills' heavy silence, leaving her sleep dark but empty. She took to wearing headphones everywhere and drowned the whispers out.

* * *

Two weeks later, her assistant rapped on the partition door.

"There's a woman on the phone for you. Says the police told her to call you? It's about some guy--"

Hester's hand was already on the phone. She shooed her assistant out and punched the line number before she could think too much about who the caller might be.

"Hello?"

"Ah, yes, hello. This is Hester?"

"Yes, that's me." She swallowed back frustration and eagerness, struggling to keep her voice flat.

"The police, they said you might be able to tell me something about my brother."

* * *

In the coffee shop, waiting for the woman to meet her, Hester found her frustration and eagerness fading into unease. She slipped her hand into her purse and reached for an orange bottle of pills. Each twist of the cap made a faint clicking noise, like a rosary. She steadied herself with the sound as she watched the door.

Two college kids strode in, still shrouded in scarves and coats for all that the weather had turned warm, and belted out orders to the barista. An older man in a bowler hat trailed after them but halted at the site of the lengthy menu, transfixed. There was a pause, and then a woman came in, thin, with close-cropped blonde hair and a close-fitting black suit. She twisted back and forth, a willow caught in the wind, until her gaze settled on Hester.

Her eyes were the same stormy blue-gray as Oleg's. Hester shivered. She had seen this face in dreams, but not _this_ face: the cheekbones were too high, the eyes not tilted enough, the forehead faintly creased from time. It was wrong, all wrong, except for the eyes, which watched her shudder without blinking.

The woman took the gesture as encouragement and walked toward her. Each heeled step clicked against the scuffed wood floor. Hester picked up the rhythm, twisting the pill bottle faster. It took effort to set it aside, stand up, extend a hand, and smile.

"It is very good of you to meet with me," said the woman as she shook the offered hand. "I am Lyudmila."

"It's no trouble, really," Hester lied. She already longed for the feel of the pill bottle clicking in her hand. "Only I don't know if I can help much." She sank back into her chair. Lyudmila followed her lead and settled across the table.

"The police, they said that you knew my brother. That you were the one who, how do you say, told them that he had gone missing." Lyudmila looked expectant. Hester nodded. "I wondered what you might tell me about him. I never knew him, you see. I went looking for my parents, and I find that they are dead. I find that I have a brother on the same day I find that he is gone." Silence pooled for a moment, until Lyudmila filled it with a small, self-conscious laugh. "This must be very strange to you. I am sure my brother never mentioned that he had a sister."

"He mentioned you. It's just, well." Hester swallowed. "I thought you were dead."

"Dead?"

"He said you had drowned," Hester said, picking her way carefully between words. "In the Volkhov, before he was born."

"Drowned in the Volkhov," Lyudmila repeated. She was not hesitant, but she spoke slowly, examining each word as if it might hide a precious stone within the dross of Hester's stumbling intonation. "Is that the story they told?"

She sounded tired, suddenly, so terribly tired, and Hester found she was tired as well--tired of the coffee shop's relentlessly bright pale wood and glass, tired of the sharp-voiced college students that seemed to argue on every side, and tired of awkward conversation with this stranger who, but for the eyes, reminded her nothing of Oleg at all. "I can show you his apartment," she said, abruptly. "It's just as he left it. Come on."

* * *

They took a cab to the apartment, sitting side by side in silence on leather the color and texture of old cigars. The driver chattered into his cell phone in a language so foreign Hester could not tell when one word flowed into the next, except when a sudden turn or stop evoked a flurry of invective. He was still talking when she paid him his fare and stepped out.

With Lyudmila trailing behind her in sharp-toed shoes and sharp-lapeled jacket, Hester was abruptly self-conscious of the shabbiness of the building. The eagle woven into the rug, which she had vaguely thought of as a fierce protector given honorable retirement, now looked merely old and feeble. She shrugged the feeling off, irritated with herself. It was not her home to feel pride or guilt for.

Inside the apartment, a silverfish the length of Hester's index finger greeted them. It scurried for the safety of the bedroom before she could flinch. Lyudmila watched it go in silence.

"It's not much," Hester said into the silent room.

"Did my brother live here long?" Lyudmila asked. She walked to the sink and stared at the drain board as though expecting the dishes to answer.

"I don't know." Hester thought of the endless police forms with their endless unknowns. She could see their conversation stretching out in that same pattern--What did he like to do on weekends? What film did he like best, what books had he read?--and reached blindly for a different thread. "He's been gone for six months now. I've been paying the rent, but I ought to stop. The police have given up." The dry rasp that came from her throat might have been a laugh or a sob. "I knew it was hopeless, but I kept hoping. Isn't that stupid?"

Lyudmila turned away from the dishes. "It is not stupid." Her voice was hard. "Or else I am 'stupid,' too, to come here and look for my family."

"So we're both stupid," Hester said.

For a moment, Lyudmila was perfectly still, her face blank and pale as a paper doll. Then they were both laughing, laughing or sobbing, in a shared cacophony that left Hester gripping the back of the chair for balance.

"Stupid," Hester repeated, and Lyudmila nodded. "Well. Let me show you the rest of the place. There's not much."

Lyudmila toured the bedroom silently, as if all her sounds had been spent in that brief burst of feeling. She brushed a hand along the top of one mismatched dresser and opened a closet door Hester had never dared to crack, revealing one threadbare suit and six pairs of trousers. The seventh hanger was empty.

The workroom, with its menagerie of locks and keys, elicited a gasp. Hester tried to see it through a stranger's eyes: not a sorted and cataloged collection, but a bewildering mishmash of parts.

"This was where Oleg was happiest," she said, and found to her surprise that she was angry with Lyudmila for her rush to judgment. She took on the hushed voice of a docent reciting from a script. "He wanted all the keys to find, not just the locks they opened, but the locks they loved."

Lyudmila pulled her hand back from the worktable and looked at Hester sharply.

"Loved?"

The docent script had no answer to that question. Hester shrugged, and answered a different one instead. "He cared about them. If you want something to remember him by, you could take a set." The docent inside her was scandalized by the thought of disrupting the shrine, but she forged ahead, ruthless. The time for holy communion was past. "Or anything else you like. You're the next of kin, after all. Oleg would have wanted you to have them."

Lyudmila turned her head again, surveying the hundreds of locks and keys. Her gaze lingered longest on the boxes and crates of those not yet paired. The silence stretched.

"You don't have to decide now," Hester said. "I'll be cleaning the place out for days. Maybe weeks. Why don't you meet me here Saturday?"

"Yes." Lyudmila stepped away from the table. "I think that would be a very good idea." Her voice was calm, but in the corner of her left eye, Hester thought she saw a glimmer of water. She turned back to the living room, trying not to see the tear take shape, trying not to think of Oleg's tales of endlessly dripping ghosts.

* * *

On Saturday, the whole world was dripping, a downpour of fat droplets that never seemed to let up. Hester took a cab again, alone. She was deconstructing the shrine; the time for pilgrimages was over.

Lyudmila was waiting for her on the steps of the building. She had traded her sharp black shoes and suit for tweeds the color of tea leaves. Above her bloomed a brilliant pink umbrella crowded with plump yellow stars. The stars had faces. She caught Hester staring at the leering celestial bodies and grimaced.

"The rain, I was not expecting. The hotel was kind enough to lend to me, but they said this was all they had."

Hester did not mention that the hotel staff might have been playing a joke at Lyudmila's expense. The woman's pinched features suggested she had already reached that conclusion.

"Oleg might have one," she offered as she unlocked the door. The light in the front hall had gone out entirely, leaving the first flight of stairs dark. The single bulb in Oleg's living room seemed brilliant by comparison. Hester shrugged out of her jacket and unwrapped her outer scarf while Lyudmila shook the umbrella out over the bathtub.

She had brought a camera, which she pulled out of her pocket. _The furniture should go first_, she told herself with grim practicality. But she was still standing, frozen, in the center of the room when the other woman entered. The camera was dark and still in her hands.

"I don't know where to start," Hester said to the footsteps behind her. "I know he's not coming back. But I keep thinking, 'If I wait one more day, maybe.'"

Lyudmila touched her shoulder gently with one cold hand, then pulled away when Hester flinched.

"You must have loved him very much."

"Loved?" Hester's lips twisted bitterly. "I thought if I saved him, he could save me. Only he didn't. How could he? I didn't save him. So I left, and he went where I can't follow."

She heard Lyudmila's soft intake of breath. "You know where my brother is?"

The question was so matter-of-fact, Hester almost answered it. But she caught herself and shook her head. "Japan, who knows? It's just a figure of speech." She turned, uncomfortable with having the woman so close to the back of her neck even wrapped as it was beneath the protective cocoon of a silk scarf. "Is he really your brother?"

She hadn't meant to ask the question so baldly, and regretted it even before she watched Lyudmila's face close off from concern to distance. But she stifled the urge to take it back and waited for an answer. It was a long time coming, and when it came, it came slowly, as Lyudmila picked delicately through her words.

"I believe that he is. I was in the city, you see, for business. I knew my parents had come here. I had read enough in the archives in Russia for that. So I thought that I might look for them. The city is large, of course, but immigrants, they often stay close to one another. I went to the churches and spoke with the priests, asking who had come from the old country. They were glad, I think, to hear Russian again." She smiled very faintly. "My parents are dead, long dead. I visited the cemetery. The priest, he said they had a son, though he had not seen him in many years." Her eyes shut briefly, and when they opened her voice was thinner, quieter. "Their only child."

Lyudmila's features were as blank as porcelain, but her pain came through clearly. Hester fumbled for some answer.

"Oleg knew better. He talked about you, often. He missed you."

"Did he?" Lyudmila's voice was suddenly sharp. "He never knew me."

Hester shrugged. "He missed you, all the same." She did not want to explain about ghosts. Instead, she pushed the button on the camera and watched the lens slide out. It gave her something to look at besides Lyudmila's too-similar eyes. "Help me move the table under the lamp. We'll get a better picture, that way."

Later, while they maneuvered the last of the furniture into place, Hester said, "You didn't drown." It was a question dressed up as a statement, one that had been eating at Hester since the woman had first strode into the coffee shop, one there was no polite way to ask.

Lyudmila let her end of the bench settle gently onto the floor and gazed at her a moment in silence. Hester's fingers twitched for the pill bottle, far out of reach in her purse on the floor of the other room.

"I was very young and they were very poor." Each word was crisp, as sharp and distant as stars in a pitch-dark sky. "They left me at the orphanage. My mother cried." She lifted her end of the workbench, and after a moment's pause Hester began to move backward again.

"I suppose," Lyudmila said as the bench settled beneath the single fluorescent bulb, "You might say I drowned in her tears."

Hester wanted to reach out and touch her, to give her comfort and solidity. Lyudmila had never seemed more ghost-like than in that moment. But the bench was between them, and once they had finished, Lyudmila kept her distance. They finished the day's work in silence.

That night, Hester took all six pills, and fell asleep clutching a bottle to ward off any dreams that might still slip through.

* * *

On Sunday, Hester came early. The first of the ads had borne fruit, and young men in too-loose shirts came with young women in too-tight jeans to cart off the table, chair, and dresser. She pressed the dishes off on one of them and gave the drain board to another.

The third saw the mark on her neck as she bent to heft one end of the splintered plywood, and he reached with eager fingers to uncover the crossroads that scored one shoulder blade. She let the dresser fall to the floor, scratching already scored pine boards, and walked away without a word.

He followed her, of course. For all of Oleg's locks and keys, he had never troubled to install them in his inner doors.

"Just go," she said. "Take it and go."

"I can explain--" he started with childish earnestness. He was a child, she saw, when she turned to look at him, all gawky limbs and smooth cheeks.

She wanted to ask him what Palimpsest had to offer him, young and bright-eyed, with a university t-shirt that promised prestige and connections, three-piece suits and three-course dinners. She wanted to ask him what he longed so fiercely to escape, and why he thought he could find that escape only through strangers' bodies, only in sharp-edged dreams where the dead were never allowed to rest.

Instead, she said harshly, "Do you think I don't know? Do you think this is new?"

"But it's different now," the boy said. He reached out to touch her hand. She shoved him away, and he staggered back, coming to rest against the door frame. His expression was indignant and bewildered, like a child pushed away from his mother's teat.

"I don't care," she whispered. "Just go."

The boy eyed her clenched fists. Hester thought for a moment he would argue, and dug her nails deeper into her palms, but he turned, finally, and left the room. She stood in the workroom until she could no longer hear the thump of the dresser dropping down the staircase one slow step at a time.

The living room was empty and silent when she came out, so still that she almost fled back to the workroom, where at least the locks could keep her company. There was only her purse, huddled against one wall, and the crumped and folded bags and boxes she had brought and dropped just inside the door. It made it easy to spot the single rectangle of white paper the boy had left, like a molted feather, on the floor. Trembling, Hester bent and snatched it up. She crouched next to her purse and dropped it in unread.

When Lyudmila arrived, Hester was sitting on the floor of the living room with her knees drawn up to her chest, staring blankly at the empty space. The door opened and closed. Hester did not look up. After a moment, the other woman came to crouch in front of her, sitting back on heels shod in narrow black boots.

"Your eyes look just like his," Hester said at the same time Lyudmila said, "It is not your fault, I know, or his." The last words overlapped perfectly.

After a moment, Hester tried again. "What isn't my fault?" She watched Lyudmila's throat flex as she swallowed, gathering words.

"That my parents left me. That they loved my brother enough to struggle, but not me." She lifted a hand, and Hester let her lips still. "I know that is too simple. It was a different time, in their lives, in our country. But still, I am glad I think that I did not find my parents. I do not know what I might have said to them except in anger. Is that strange? After I came all this way to find them?" Hester stayed silent. Lyudmila swallowed again and continued. "I wish that I could have met my brother, though. I wish that I could have asked him what it was like, to grow up with two parents who held him very close and never let him slip away." She rocked back on her heels abruptly and stood. "And it is not fair to burden you with this."

"I think," Hester said softly, "he would have told you it was hard. I think he would have told you it was very hard to grow up with two parents who held him close, so he would not slip away like his sister. They wanted him to be everything, I think. Everything you would never have a chance to be." She kept her face tilted down and watched the other woman's shadow pace across the floor.

"You must have known him very well," Lyudmila said at last.

Hester laughed, a sharp, unhappy sound. "I wanted to know him well. I wanted to make him coffee and read scraps of the morning paper to him while he worked. But I didn't. I bought him cups from the deli. They were cold when I got here. Who finds love over cold deli coffee?"

She did not expect an answer because there was none. Hester looked up into the silence and met Lyudmila's eyes. Unexpectedly gentle, Lyudmila said, "I made my husband coffee every morning, and he never found love in it. Maybe he was craving a cup from the corner store. Maybe it was too hot for him. Who can say?" She smiled at Hester, though it was an empty smile. Hester returned it and pushed herself to her feet.

She gathered her bags and boxes, and together they sorted Oleg's clothes: this set to be donated, this to be tossed out on the street corner where the garbage truck could swallow it. As they worked, Lyudmila hummed snatches of unrecognizable melodies, some mournful and other brisk. Oleg, Hester was certain, had never played music like this, and yet it still felt right, somehow, in this room.

At the bottom of one drawer, buried beneath moth-eaten sweaters, Hester found a picture frame. In it was a young couple with pale hair and high cheekbones. The man stared at the camera; the woman looked down at a young boy whose hand she clasped tightly in her own. Wordlessly, Hester handed it to Lyudmila. Their hands brushed. The humming stopped.

"It is good, there where we are not," Lyudmila said, her eyes fixed on the two clasped hands. "I wish that I might have told him that."

"I don't think," Hester said, thinking of the young boy that morning, "he would have listened." It was as comforting as she could be and still be truthful. _And when_, she wondered bitterly, _did I become so concerned about the truth?_

Lyudmila shrugged. "I might still have tried." She tucked the picture away in her purse. "Then, perhaps, he would still be here with you."

Hester shook her head, a small, tight gesture, but Lyudmila had turned to the next drawer and did not see.

There were no further surprises in the room, only sheets and ties and socks with the heels worn through. They hauled the last of the bags into the living room and stared, together, at the door to the workroom.

"Well." Hester gave a slight shrug, and stepped over the threshold. The room was lit by a close cousin to the coiled snake of glass that fluoresced over the living room, but it seemed darker. Perhaps the keyholes swallowed light.

The collection dismayed her. The clothes and furniture were hard to discard because it meant admitting that Oleg was gone where she could not ever follow him, did not want to believe he might be. The locks and keys were Oleg's, but they were more than Oleg's. Even in the absence of their matchmaker they retained a sense of life. Every lock watched her with a single anxious eye.

Lyudmila had followed Hester in with a single empty box, which she set quietly against the floor. Hester thought about private collectors, museums. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the locks were still staring.

"Keep them in pairs," she told Lyudmila as she reached for the closest lock, an olive-green keypad with numbers worn entirely away, and the tiny luggage key that lay across its first row of buttons. _I'm sorry_, she told the pair as she reverently settled them in the base of the box. _At least you can be buried together. At least you can rest in peace_.

It took eight boxes to clear away Oleg's mated pairs and another three for the unmatched locks and keys left loose in the corners of the room. Lyudmila pushed the last box into place in the living room and brushed dust off her sleeves as Hester taped it shut.

"It is time for a drink." Her tone left no room for questions.

It was a Sunday night, and Hester had not been drinking in years, not since the first of the prescriptions. She had always fastidiously followed her doctor's warnings. Even the night she emptied the bottles and went to lie in Oleg's arms, she had felt no temptation to chase it down with a shot of vodka or a glass of wine.

It was a Sunday night, and she could still hear the locks and keys pleading, even shut away in their boxes. She could still feel the touch of the young boy on her wrist. She could still see Lyudmila's face as she stared at the picture, at the man's empty hand that did not clasp her own.

"A drink," she agreed, and let Lyudmila lead the way.

* * *

They found a small bar five blocks from Oleg's apartment building, with an unblinking neon sign in the window that proclaimed "oro eer" in slashes of blue and yellow light. Two old men sat at the bar, so still on their stools that Hester thought they were statues until one raised a glass ponderously to his lips. He set it back on the bar with the same deliberate speed and resumed his silent vigil.

Lyudmila clicked her way across the stained floor and settled at other end of the bar. Hester trailed in her wake. They ordered drinks from a bartender who moved as slowly as his older patrons. Hester swirled her glass with the straw, listening to the ice rustle, and thought fleetingly of the bottles tucked into her purse.

Lyudmila set the photograph on the bar and framed it with the single lock and key set she had salvaged: a palm-sized brass padlock labeled only in braille and a paper-thin gold key whose pliable metal made clear its origin as jewelry. She stared at them for a long moment, then lifted her shot of vodka toward Hester.

"To family," she said, and drank it down in one swallow before the two glasses could touch.

"To family," Hester echoed. She took a long sip.

"My husband," Lyudmila said, as the bartender ambled toward them with another shot in hand, "he said I do not know what it is to be family. Perhaps he is right. I should miss them more, I think, my mother and father and brother. I should mourn." She wrapped her fingers around the second shot and held it up to the dim neon light. "I should miss him."

"Where is he?" Hester took another drink, felt her throat cool and burn again.

"Drowned in the Volkhov," Lyudmila said bitterly. "It is as good a story as any. Lost in Siberia with my brother. No. He is living very happily in Moscow, sixteen kilometers away from me, in a house with a yellow door. Our children are with him, while I am abroad."

Hester swirled her glass again, staring into its depths. "I miss my parents," she said to the glass. "I don't really remember them. They died, you see. I was four. I miss them so fiercely. But then I think about my grandparents. They raised me. I think about how I miss them, and what I feel for my parents--it's paper-thin. It's the feeling I think I should have. It's like missing Oleg," she added, and winced as the words flowed out. "I barely knew him. I miss what I think we should have had. You can't miss, really miss, what you don't know."

"My brother missed me, you said." With one smooth motion she tilted and emptied her shot glass. "I wish I could have asked him how it is done. Perhaps he could have taught me"

Hester thought about ghosts and visions, about the long row of bottles above Oleg's sink and the bed that had stayed wet and frozen for days. How did you make sense of that, learn from that? She opened her mouth to try and looked up from her glass.

She had seen Lyudmila cry, seen her face close off in sorrow or strain like the stars disappearing behind cloud, leaving the sky blank and black. But she had never seen before the reverse, this terrible _openness_. Lyudmila's eyes were half-lidded, her mouth opened just wide enough for her teeth to clench on her lower lip, her cheeks drooping.

Hester closed her mouth and opened it again.

"I know where your brother is," she whispered. "I can show you the way."

* * *

They went to Lyudmila's hotel room. Oleg's apartment was closer, but bare, so bare, and Hester could not stomach the idea of beginning there. Love in those walls, like love nurtured on cold deli coffee, was not destined to end well.

_So this is love, then_, she thought bitterly as the elevator chimed up the floors. She looked sideways at Lyudmila, standing stiff and tall in her heeled boots, her face a mask once more. If it was love, it was love for Oleg, surely, for the shadows of him she saw in his sister's too-lined face.

"Will this help you heal?" Lyudmila asked as their hands touched, fingers tracing first knuckles and then the bird-thin bones in the wrist. "Will it help you mourn my brother, or learn not to mourn him?" She did not believe, not truly, not yet.

Hester raised her hand to Lyudmila's face to silence her and let her finger settle along the line of her lips.

"I don't do this," she said, not sure she believed what they were doing herself. "I don't, truly." She had never taken a lover virgin to Palimpsest's streets, not since the city's mark blossomed on her neck. Its cruelty, its callousness, had shattered her. She did not want to be responsible for shattering others.

She could not bear the thought that it might not shatter others, that it might be kind rather than cruel. She did not want her own pain to be the door through which others might find grace. Not until Oleg had come, with his angel's purity and desperate need. Even then, his pain drew her. He was proof that the city was cruel to more than her.

It was cruel to Lyudmila. It had taken her brother from her, had stolen her name and face to lure him in. Was it fair to Lyudmila, to open the way for it to hurt her more?

Was it fair, to never let her learn the truth?

Lyudmila's lips parted around Hester's finger, just enough for her tongue to slide out and caress the inside of the knuckle. Hester sighed, a quiet sigh, and bent down to return the kiss, pressing her lips to where Lyudmila's neck and shoulder met. Her hands pulled away from Lyudmila's face, trailing gently down the line of her jaw, to rest against the other woman's hips.

"It does not matter," Lyudmila whispered, reaching for the buttons on Hester's shirt. "It does not." She kept whispering as skin slowly revealed itself, as clothes fell away, now in English, now in Russian. "I will know you, and you will know me. We will mourn each other."

* * *

`If one is to understand Palimpsest, one must understand this: the map predates the city. There was never a time when those curving streets, those broad avenues, were not branded into the grass and soil and stone of the plain that would one day be Palimpsest. As every arcing leaf and drooping petal is held in miniature within the seed, so, too, the city. It needed only human blood and tears and sweat to water it, nurture it, help it burst forth.`

`If one is to understand Palimpsest, one must understand this: its maps are useless. Are the numbers of its immigrants finite? Will it one day expend the last of its neighborhoods for some pimple-faced boy, some sallow-skinned girl, leaving no ink left to mark future travelers? No, no. Each time new feet stumble, still wet with ink, from Orlande's shop, they set neighborhoods shifting like tectonic plates in miniature. This one shrinks, this one expands, this one shatters into a dozen pieces as an orgy unexpectedly brings three quartos mewling into Palimpsest on one night.`

`(Orlande works long hours to host them, to bind them. One will find happiness, one will find sorrow, and one will find all they desire only to have it taste like ashes on their shared tongues.)`

`If one is to understand Palimpsest, one must understand both things: its maps are eternal, its maps are ever-changing. They provide no guidance for the tourist, and even the resident is apt to find their neighborhood changed overnight. But nonetheless, they are essential. They are a key, a pass phrase, a code. Two travelers exchange them, and between them they knit the city anew.`

`It is those thousands of exchanges, on thousands of nights, that keep the city whole.`

`But what of the traveler who has nothing to exchange? How do they find their way here, those without maps on their tongues and toes and the soft, soft flesh of their belly? Let us peek, you and I, let us see.`

`A foreigner is offered a map, and traces its lines like letters in an unknown tongue. She cannot decipher them. It does not matter; that is not the purpose of the map. But the map reads her. Here is the rushing thoroughfare of her desire; there, the thin back alley where her loneliness is piled high in plump and splitting bags made from the thinnest of skin. Here are her wharves, where boats of memory bob on the ponderous currents of her history. The tides are deeper and stranger than the lazy surface betrays; some boats capsize, are never seen again except as skeletal shipwrecks. Divers will someday scour them for gold and find only bronze and rotted leather, mechanisms whose purpose is lost to the bellies of fishes and lamp-bright eels.`

`We are all maps, no more or less than Palimpsest.`

`The city studies her currents, her roadways, her gates. The map expands. It offers bridges between _her_ and _there_. She picks one. We will not trouble ourselves over which; all roads, all maps, lead to Orlande's house for the newest come, the strangers in our midst who nonetheless shape our streets with their flesh, our history with their desires, our populace with their dreams.`

`And what of the other, the one who passed over her map? There is no map for her to take in exchange. Perhaps if she were better-traveled she might find her way by memory, for though it is reading another the map is still dark and heavy on her skin. But she is not; she does not care to be.`

`Where does she find herself, this woman who has made herself part of a bridge for other feet to trod? Off the map, perhaps.`

`But the map is Palimpsest; there is no world beyond the map that lies as old as a dinosaur's bones beneath the soil.`

`Very well, then. Perhaps she has found herself there, to that empty plain ringed by mountains, where the breeze whistles through the tamarisk trees and no blood has ever been shed. Perhaps.`

`What matters is this: she has gone somewhere we cannot follow.`

* * *

Hester woke to gray light and the sound of a pigeon, improbably perched on the twentieth-story windowsill, banging its beak against glass. Lyudmila was already awake, propped on one shoulder and watching her.

"Well," she said.

"You dreamed of a city," Hester said, before Lyudmila could continue, before she could rationalize and sanitize and brush the night away. The words were fuzzy on her sleep-muddled tongue. "Of an intersection. Sixteenth and Hieratica. And of a woman with the head of a frog. She's real," she said fiercely, fingers knotted tightly in the tangled sheets. It was everything she had ignored, everything she had dismissed, everything she had tried so hard to disbelieve. If she were forced to embrace it for truth then so, damn her, would be this woman. "She's as real as you or I."

"And so?" Lyudmila asked, pale eyes fixed unblinking on her.

"Oleg is there, now. In that city. It's where he lives and breathes and shits and sleeps."

Lyudmila considered. The pigeon took flight and left the room in silence. The sheer gauze curtains began to shine faintly as the sun crept toward the horizon.

"I dreamed," Lyudmila said slowly, "of the woman with the head of a frog. She bound my hands to others and placed a card on my knee. It had ten lamp posts on it. One of the stranger's palms sweated until water ran down my arm. I thought I would never be dry."

Hester reached for her hand, her dry hand, and held it. Lyudmila did not pull away. "It's a dream," Hester said, "but not a dream. If you're hurt there, you hurt. If you die there, you die. But water--it doesn't translate. It's not of you, I think."

"I can still feel it," Lyudmila mused. "If I close my eyes, I can still feel it dripping." Hester clenched her hand tighter. Lyudmila's face shifted, eyebrows lifted and eyes widened in a flicker of amusement. "Not as strongly as I can feel you."

Hester licked her lips, which had gone dry. "That's because he's part of your quarto. Part of you."

"My quarto?"

"The four of you whose hands were bound. You're a quarto. You're joined."

Lyudmila's eyebrow rose again, but with less amusement. "Who is your 'quarto'?"

"I don't know," Hester said sharply, too sharply. "I've never met them, never looked. You need your quarto to immigrate, to step through. I don't want to move there. I don't even want to visit."

"But you took me there."

Hester dropped Lyudmila's hand and buried her face in both palms. "I shouldn't have," she told the wrinkled skin. "I shouldn't have done lots of things. I should never have gone down to Oleg."

"You showed my brother this?" Lyudmila asked, a swift knife stroke of a question.

Hester shook her head, just as sharply. "He'd been. But he couldn't find the way again. You need another person, and he didn't know how to find us. I showed him. He was starving, wasting away. Maybe, if I hadn't, he would have given up. He would have gone home and cooked eggs. He would have fallen in love with new locks. Someone else would have shown him the way, some day. He could have been a tourist. But I came along, and I said, 'I can rescue him.' I didn't want to! But no one else was coming." She laughed, hands still pressed against her mouth, still shielding her eyes from Lyudmila's face. "That's what I told myself. And for him, his quest bore fruit. His vigil was rewarded. How could he turn away from the city after it was delivered to him? After his prayers were answered. He couldn't." She laughed again, a hiccuping sob. "I think I thought, if I showed him how much it could hurt, he'd turn away from it. I did, for years and years. I took pills. We could have taken pills together. And now he's gone."

Lyudmila was silent, but after a moment, Hester felt the warmth of the other woman's arm settle around her shoulders. She stiffened, then grabbed for Lyudmila's hand before she could pull away. "I was going to tell you," Hester said, one half of her mouth still muffled by her hand, "that I took you there because you wanted to see him. But it would be lying. I wanted to see him. That's all."

"I do not think it is all," Lyudmila said. "You know how to find people, you said. Other people who can be doors."

Hester shrugged, uncomfortable. "They're all so frantic, now. They want to get through. They're filled with joy that they can, and filled with despair that they haven't, yet. I don't think I could take that. I know I couldn't. I don't want to find my quarto. I want to find Oleg."

"And?" Lyudmila asked, as the silence and the light of dawn stretched like taffy across the room.

"I don't know," Hester whispered. Her shoulders slumped.

"You did not find him tonight."

"No. No, that's not how it works." She realized, suddenly, she had never shown Lyudmila her mark. Hester found it hard to lean forward, to brush her hair to either side. She had hidden it for years. Like any hidden thing, it found the light blinding. But it was only exposed briefly; then Lyudmila's hand came forward to trace its lines and shelter it.

"It is a map," she said, as she studied the black lines tinged ever-so-faintly green. "Coriander and--."

"Ultramarine." Hester grimaced and shook her hair back abruptly. "We all have them. It's where we take others. You have one, too."

She looked, but most of Lyudmila was hidden beneath the sheets. Even her brief survey of the woman's shoulders, neck, and single exposed breast left her feeling embarrassed, as though she had been caught peeping through a keyhole. It was an absurd reaction for someone who had done the things she had done last night. She forced herself to look again, not searching for the mark but simply admiring the way skin fitted itself over bones and flowed along muscles. Only when she was done did she at last notice the single black stroke, crooked like a beckoning finger, that followed the angles of Lyudmila's collarbone. Fainter lines crossed it, thin as hairs.

Lyudmila did not seem to notice Hester's examination. Her eyes were narrowed, almost closed, her lips pursed. "I remember a man with a belly the shape of the moon," she said, distantly. "He was kind."

Hester fought against jealousy with memories of how soft that skin was, how warm. She lost the battle. "You're lucky," she said bitterly.

"Am I?" Lyudmila's eyes were still half-lidded. They opened, slowly, as it became clear Hester would not answer. "I did not see my brother," she added.

"He lives by the river," Hester said, remembering whispers she had tried to ignore. "It isn't--isn't on me. But you can get there, I think. Or," she swallowed, "or there's always someone else."

"You would do this again, then? To find my brother?"

"Yes. Yes." Hester looked out the window to avoid wondering if one of those two was a lie. Her office was out there, across the square. Below her was where Oleg had waited. "But today, I have to go to work."

Her office might be close, but her clothes were not, and she could not go to work in the castoffs she wore to Oleg's yesterday, which had been colonized by whole civilizations of dust. She made her excuses, and left without meeting Lyudmila's eyes.

* * *

The evening found Hester wishing that Lyudmila's hotel had stairs. The elevator ascended the twenty stories too quickly, let them blur like pages in a riffled book. Hester wanted to stop and read them. But the two other elevator occupants, ascending to even higher planes, shooed her out quickly. That left her standing at Lyudmila's door, one anonymous metal slab among thousands, with a single, staring eye placed just high enough to look superciliously over Hester's head. Hester glared balefully back at it and knocked.

Her hands were empty. She had considered bringing food, but remembered endless trips to Oleg with paper bags in hand. It would not be a promising start. Instead, she had eaten dinner at a tourist bar chosen at random, an unremarkable place with too-dim lights and vinyl booths the color of mulberries.

The door opened unexpectedly as Hester's hand wavered towards a second knock. Lyudmila wore the crisp black suit from the day they had met, but her feet were bare. She nodded Hester in and shut the door before padding silently back across the carpet to the single sofa. The travel magazines on the coffee table had been shoved aside to make room for a half-empty bottle of wine and two glasses.

"I was not certain you would be returning," Lyudmila said as she poured the second glass and handed it to Hester.

She took it, then stared through the straw-yellow liquid at the floor, wondering at how her reflexes betrayed her. It made the beige carpet gleam gold. "I don't drink," she said apologetically, and flushed at Lyudmila's arched brow. "Not usually. I have pills. They keep me from dreaming."

"But you say it is not a dream."

"From remembering, then."

Lyudmila took a deep drink, watching her steadily over the rim of her glass. "You do not intend to return, then. Simply to," she spread her empty hand, "open the door and wave me on my way."

"I don't know," Hester whispered. "It scares me. It scares me, all right? How it takes people and swallows them up. Even the dead, it doesn't let go." She was aware she was babbling, but Lyudmila made no move to break in. "There's a place, my place. You'll see it. I should warn you. I should have warned Oleg. It's where the dead go. They don't rest, you see. They don't stay underground. They stand up, and bamboo grows around them. It pinches them tight and stretches them tall. And they keep growing and growing, further and further from the earth. And you'd think, well, maybe that would be enough. Maybe they can find peace, if they grow high enough. But their feet are always on the ground. And the living cut holes in the bamboo and they touch the dead. They whisper to them. They never let them rest." She can see the bamboo now, reaching tall and straight into the sky. Sometimes the hair of the dead waves from the top of the poles, like smoke.

"Is that not what we are trying to do with Oleg?" Lyudmila asked, her words gentle and slow.

"What?"

"He has gone somewhere he cannot be brought back from. And here we are, who remain, cutting tiny holes so we may whisper farewell." She drank again, settled her glass on the table, and reached for Hester's free hand with both of her own. "Is that so terrible a thing?"

Hester stared at her, angry, and then abruptly raised her own glass to her lips. _He isn't dead_, she wanted to say. _It's not the same at all_. But he was, in all the ways that mattered. He was untouchable, beyond caring about their lives in this world where the dead, like her grandparents, rested beneath the weight of stone.

Oleg's ghosts had always been restless. And Oleg, she remembered, had not minded the doors and the grave-keeper's whispers.

"I don't know," she repeated, and finished her glass.

Lyudmila's hands withdrew from hers with a gentle stroke of fingertips. They settled instead in Hester's short hair, rubbing at her temples, at the space just below her ears. Hester set the wineglass down and settled slowly back against the sofa, sliding by degrees until her head nestled in Lyudmila's lap.

"My grandparents," she said, as the tide of Lyudmila's fingers rose and fell, "were from Germany. They watched their parents rise into the sky from furnaces. They never asked me for much. They gave, and gave, and gave. But the one thing--the one thing--they asked was to make sure they were buried. They wanted it to be deep. And they wanted a stone, a big stone. So that I could always find them. So I never had to be them, that girl and boy, watching the smoke rise and not knowing which coil was their parents and which one was a stranger."

"I am sorry. What else does one say?" Lyudmila's fingers never stopped.

Hester shrugged. "It was a long time ago. That's what they always say. It was a long time ago, and I wasn't born. I should let it go. That's what Oleg would have said, if I had told him."

"You say he did not let me go, and that was a long time ago, and before he was born."

Hester was silent for a long while. Her eyes drifted shut. "Maybe," she said at last. "Maybe. And maybe it isn't so bad, to want to say goodbye." She opened her eyes in time to see Lyudmila bend down, graceful as a withy, to kiss her lips. Her own parted, surprised, to let Lyudmila's tongue dart against hers.

Lyudmila was the first to break away. "Then let us see, you and I, if we can find my wayward brother."

* * *

`At Archiloquy and Defalcation, near Colophon Station, stand the trading houses of Palimpsest. There markets were managed and futures bid upon within walls paneled with sparrow bones and rhodium, garnets and lion's teeth. Once the traders shrieked their bids, they screamed them to the heavens, so loud that even the tallest dead might hear. But the walls grew thin, as walls paneled in precious substances tend to do, and the neighbors whispered complaints among themselves furiously, until the whispers grew as loud as the cries within the trading houses.`

`Shouted meetings were held, defenses and accusations traded back and forth. At last, a solution was settled upon. The surgeons were called in.`

`At the time, the cutting of the larynx, the stealing of the voice, was little-known and less-practiced. A handful of traders saw promise in it. They purchased shares quietly--how else, now that they were silenced?--in its future. `

`In the years that followed, they became the first war profiteers. Others sold weapons, armor, intelligence. They profited from flesh itself. In some corners of Palimpsest it is rumored that one of the three was the first to propose the notion of animal soldiers to the battle surgeons, but it is not rumored too loudly. The war profiteers may be mute, but they hear every whisper as clearly as the roar within a conch.`

`When the war ended, many veterans sought employment within the trading houses. Their lack of voices meant nothing there. If they wrapped their hands in gloves, shrouded their heads in veils and hats, tucked their tails into their trousers, they could, almost, pass. So they came, and joined the traders in raising delicately scripted signs high in the air. `

`They set to their work with determination. But they did not look kindly on the war profiteers, nor did the war profiteers care for seeing the origins of their wealth. And why should they stay? They had made money beyond the counting of it. Trading, after the war, could be nothing more than a game. They decided--without conversing among themselves, of course--that if all that remained was games, they would set their own rules.`

`So they left, the three. They purchased land across the street from the trading houses, and there they built the counting houses of Palimpsest. They had learned from the lessons of the trading houses, and did not turn to gold or ivory or maiden's hair when it came time to build. Instead, the walls were of glass. Within the walls of the first swam fishes tiny and golden as coins, with teeth bright and sharp as silver knives. Within the walls of the second climbed a hedge of roses whose thorns scratched at the glass but never quite broke through. Within the walls of the third flickered flames.`

`No one knows what feeds them save the three war profiteers, and they do not speak.`

`Inside the houses, under the watchful gaze of fish and flowers and flames, workers open crates of coin and sort them, count them. The rule of the counting houses is simple: no two coins alike may remain within, and every coin known to man and monster must eventually find its way there. Boxes of gold are catalogued and dismissed, sent across the street to where they may purchase a nautilus shell, a lion's whisker, a single witch's tear.`

`The counting houses are always hiring. Gold is heavy, and accidents are common. Immigrants often find their way here. Immigrants have no money, as everyone knows. For some, the chance to touch wealth is worth the risk, even if it is not their own.`

`Immigrants carry boxes full of copper and silver and the bone disks of Marrow across the street, and veterans return with all manner of strange currencies. It is here, at Archiloquy and Defalcation, that the two worlds meet most often.`

`Naturally, there are incidents. `

* * *

`Hester shivers, though the wall of flames is hot behind her, and wishes there were shadows to retreat into. She is in the narrow alley between counting houses. Between her and the wall of roses stand three men. Two are human. They wear the uniform of counting-house workers; loose-fitting trousers and tunics as sheer as the wind that open every detail of their bodies to inspection and leave no shadows or crevices in which a coin might be hid.`

`The third wear a board around his neck, the symbol of traders. His features are ordinary: smooth cheeks, a crooked nose, and soft brown eyes that on anyone else Hester would have called gentle. But it is hard to think of this man as gentle when his right hand has been replaced with a scorpion's claw. The giant scorpion is native to the desert south of Palimpsest, and its touch is always deadly. `

`The man knows this. He takes care not to touch, accepts handshakes with a nod, caresses his wife with his lips and tongue. At home, he wears the claw wrapped in bandages, layer upon layer of white linen treated in saltwater and moonlight to neutralize the poison. At work, he wears a pair of leather gloves whose forest of tendrils and curlicues both conceal the shape of the claw and slow writing to a laborious trudge.`

`It is to write more quickly a message to the counting-house workers that he has removed his glove. But they do not care about the message itself; it was only a pretext. Now one of them holds the glove, and the other one taunts the scorpion-man, whose claw flexes involuntarily with each harsh word.`

`Hester bites her knuckles. She does not know that the men are immigrants, or the scorpion-man a veteran. She only knows that there is violence brewing here. But before she can decide whether to shout or flee or only press further back against the burning wall, a door opens in the wall of roses and a fourth man steps through.`

`This one also wears the uniform of the counting houses, but his is more elaborate. Twice as many layers, woven from silks half as thick, shroud his body. The result is still transparent, but in the same way as wispy spring clouds; it carries a sense that the slightest gust of wind might transform it, whipping it thicker to shroud the man completely or tearing it away to leave him entirely exposed. `

`He frowns at the men and tells the scorpion-man a clear and forceful "Good day," his tone drowning in pity and distaste. The scorpion-man glances longingly at his glove. The first man is holding it at arm's length, but he makes no motion to release the spiraling tendril that he grips tightly between thumb and forefinger. After a moment of chittering hesitation, the scorpion-man scurries out of the alley, right hand bare.`

`The well-dressed man turns to Hester.`

`"This is not a good place for a lady," he says sternly. "Particularly not at night."`

`"I'm sorry," she says shakily. "It's where--I just came through."`

`"Ah!" he says in sudden comprehension. "Then you are an immigrant."`

`"A tourist," she corrects. The other two men turn to regard her curiously after his pronouncement, and she shies away from their gazes.`

`"You can go back to work," the newcomer tells them, and they do so. He turns again to Hester. "I have not seen others arrive here."`

`"The map is new."`

`He takes her in: her hunched shoulders, her arms clutched to her chest, her twitching gaze. "And you are new as well?"`

`"No," she says quietly, and then more fiercely, "no." She is no old hand at this. She has tried hard to forget. But seven years of whispers will teach one something, whether one wills to hear them or no. `

`"But you are still a tourist," he says. "Your family must be difficult to find." He glances about the alley. A small frown creases his lips. "Come inside with me. Tell me what you know of them. I am an expatriate; I have lived here four months now. I can travel anywhere I will. Come inside with me, and I will help you find them, your family."`

`She follows him out of the alley to where the flames arch highest around the doubled doors, chewing her lip. "Oleg," she says, as they stand outside the doors. The heat is more intense here. She can feel sweat beading along the back of her neck. "I'm looking for Oleg. He's thin." She has no idea if this is true any longer, but she forges on regardless. "His hair is pale and he has eyes the color of storms. He opens locks."`

`"Oleg?" He turns around, and his thousands of silken scarves swirl as he moves. "But he has a family. They are all here now. I have not met them, of course. They are very grand, not for the likes of me. They know people, powerful people. But I am rising in the world. Perhaps some day I will visit him, he and his wife, in their riverboat house with its onion-domed roof. Perhaps someday I will visit him, and he will grant me a key." His voice has grown soft and wistful, but it sharpens abruptly. "No, it is not Oleg you want. He is claimed. Tell me about your family."`

`She knows the answer to his question. She smells honeysuckle, sometimes, even in the depths of winter; dreams of the touch and color of rich velvets and silks, which she buries in the waking world with a wardrobe of gray and brown and tweed. She saw a face once on TV which she recognized as clearly as her own before her shaking hand could change the channel. But these are not things she wants to tell him, this stranger. These are not things she wants to tell herself.`

`Instead, she asks in a voice sharp and hollow like reeds, "His wife?"`

`"She is very beautiful, and her hair flows like water."`

`Hester regards him, unblinking. `

`"Her name is Lyudmila," he says. His voice is tinged with irritation. "But that is beside the point."`

`Hester does not let him continue. "He is married to a ghost," she says harshly, and she turns away.`

`She can feel his frown, hot as the flames against her back. "Whatever you had before," he lectures, "it makes no difference now. He is married to her now. Find your own quarto. No one else will love you as much as they."`

`She has nothing more to say to him. She walks down Archiloquy, away from trading house and counting house, and takes a turn at random to ease the burning on her neck.`

`The streets grow narrower and narrower as houses replace storefronts and cobbles replace flagstones. They open out abruptly into a small square. A plaque carved from whale baleen names it Binnacle Plaza in letters stained night-dark with ink. Five roads end here, and one small, round door leads away into the darkness of a church.`

`Between Hester and the door stands a small fountain basin perched on three carved stone dolphins. The fountain was drained during the war, when fresh water became a scarce and valuable resource. Two tern-headed soldiers died here, defending the last precious drops from a plague of jewel-inlaid frogs.`

`But that was years ago, and the soldiers have been forgotten. The fountain remains empty. Inside it swim the ghosts of fish. Hester stares at them and shudders. It is further proof that Palimpsest's dead do not rest.`

`She hears a cough and jerks her head upward. The racking, ragged sound is too familiar not to draw her. She has spent sleepless nights thinking of it, tense days trying to drown it in coffee and honey and oranges. Oleg is standing in the shadow of the doorway, arms hanging loosely at his sides. It is hard to tell in the shadows, but he looks well despite the cough. His shoulders stretch his shirt, and his hair is neatly combed. When he speaks, his voice is so clear and strong she barely recognizes it.`

`"You found me, Hester." He smiles at her. She thinks it is the first time she has ever seen him smile, really smile, not some half-hearted twist of the lips formed merely out of a sense of expectation. "I didn't think it would take you so long."`

`She steps around the fountain and walks across the square slowly, as if moving under water. "Why did you think I would look? You said, 'Go away.' You said you didn't want me."`

`His smile falters. "I didn't mean those things."`

`"Yes, you did. You wanted your ghost." She cannot bear to call it by Lyudmila's name.`

`"I can want more than one thing," he says, earnest. His face is still too bright, his posture too straight. He looks at her as though she is everything he has ever wanted. She knows, with terrible clarity, that this is not Oleg, and yet she cannot turn away.`

`"I know." She steps closer to him--to it--and folds her arms across her chest. "You can want him and me and her and everyone else in the world. You're very good at wanting. But you don't know how to take care of what you want. You're very good at being cruel."`

`"I am trying to learn!" Oleg's features shift like melting snow. His hair lengthens until it hangs down his back in damp tendrils, his eyes shade slightly toward blue, his cheekbones shrink and sharpen. Lyudmila stands in front of her now, but not her Lyudmila with close-cropped hair and a face like a porcelain mask. This Lyudmila is no younger, but she is fresher, somehow, more child-like. "When Oleg visited the graveyard, I came myself to comfort him. I am learning what people need: meaning, belonging, desire, a hand to catch tears." Her smile is proud. "November is teaching me lists," she confides. "And I can give you all those things. I know it went poorly before, but oh! I am learning. Can we not try again? I have such things planned for you."`

`"Why would I take those things from _you_?"`

`Lyudmila looks puzzled. "Because you do not have them, of course. I select for that. For loyalty, but also for need. It does no good for me to call those who will not come. Like you. Oh, but do not feel hurt! I am sure you will come in time."`

`"No," Hester says. "No, I won't. You can't have me. You can't have everything you want. You have Oleg. Isn't that enough? That you have him, and I never got to say goodbye? That you took him, and left me with no gravestone to visit?"`

`"But you did say goodbye. You told him the end of your story," Lyudmila says patiently. "It is not my fault that our story continued after the thread of yours was snipped and tucked away."`

`"Maybe I wanted a different ending," Hester whispers. "Maybe we could have found one, if you hadn't interfered."`

`"All I did was show Oleg what he wanted," Lyudmila objects. "I could give more to him than you. There is no sense being unhappy over that. It is like being upset at the mountains for being taller than the trees."`

`"Life," Hester says furiously, "is not about that. It's not about getting exactly what you want."`

`"Then why are you so angry that you do not have Oleg?" Lyudmila tips her head to one side, curious.`

`Hester presses her lips together, feeling drained. At last, she says, "You really don't understand people, do you? You really don't understand people at all."`

`"I am trying to learn," Lyudmila repeats, but she says it to Hester's back. Hester is already walking out of the square. She chooses the second street to the left and watches its cobbles blur through her tears.`

* * *

Hester woke up to a watery room that slowly resolved itself as she blinked her eyes dry. Lyudmila was still sleeping, stretched out long and straight beneath perfectly smooth sheets that hardly looked as though they belonged in the same bed as the wrinkled maelstrom that Hester abruptly pushed aside. She padded across the carpet to the shower and drowned what remained of her tears.

When Hester emerged, shrouded in towels, Lyudmila was sitting on the edge of the bed staring out the window. Without turning her head, she said, "I had wondered if you were trying to recreate the scene of my supposed death."

"Something like that," Hester said with a pinched smile. "But you're alive and well in Palimpsest. Did you know that? Everyone says so."

Lyudmila cast a swift glance over her shoulder. "The grave-keeper said I looked familiar," she said. "I did not think to question what it meant."

Hester sighed and pressed her eyes against her palms. When she looked up, she saw Lyudmila's back again, the sharp angles of her shoulder blades and the dimples along her spine. Feeling overdressed, she dropped her towels and moved to sit beside her. "Oleg," she told the window, "thought he could see your ghost. He talked to her. He didn't tell me, at first. He was very good at keeping secrets. And then one day she was gone. Just gone, vanished. Like Oleg," Hester added, and laughed a little, a hoarse sound like sandpaper. "Just like Oleg, really. She went to Palimpsest. Not really, of course. But he stopped seeing her here. He started seeing her only in the city. That's why he was so crazy to get back. He'd lived his whole life with her. He didn't know how to do it alone. He stopped being able to keep secrets. That one, anyway." She forced herself to turn away from the window, toward Lyudmila's stiff profile. "I should have said all this before."

"Yes," Lyudmila said. Her voice was a storm on a far-off horizon. "Yes, perhaps you should have."

"I was afraid," Hester said simply. She chewed on her lower lip. "He was in love with her." The words came very quick and fast. "Not me, her. I always thought it. But he never said it, not straight out. But they say," she started, halted, and started again, "people say they're married, in Palimpsest. Oleg and her. Your ghost." She reached a hand halfway to Lyudmila, then stopped, uncertain. It hovered in the air like a lost bird.

"Married." Hester had nothing to say to that, and therefore said nothing. Her hand trembled and drifted down. Lyudmila began to laugh, hollow as a bell. "And is this why I do not know what it is to be family? Because my brother has all of our knowledge, together?" She stopped laughing abruptly. "Your city is treacherous."

Hester wanted to shout, _It's not my city_. She bit her lip harder instead and stared out the window silently with Lyudmila, watching the sun brighten. Her hand settled on Lyudmila's knee. Slowly, Lyudmila's hand shifted to cover hers.

"I was a very bad wife," Lyudmila said eventually. "I wonder, is my . . . ghost better? Perhaps it is her advice I should be seeking, not my brother's. Perhaps she could tell me how to keep my heart at home, instead of locking it behind office doors. Perhaps she could tell me how to keep my eyes opened, so I do not blink and find my children grown."

"I don't think so," Hester said.

"I am running out of places," Lyudmila said, bitterness as thick on her tongue as honey, "to ask for advice. I will go home, soon. My business in New York will be done. And I will take my son and daughter back, from the vacation that has been an idyll for them. They will kiss me like dutiful children, and then they will go back to dreaming of their next visit with their father. He is the one who knows the names of their friends, who helps them with their school work, who sees when they are sick. I am the one who comes home too late and leaves too early, who is never there to praise the picture she has painted or the game that he has won."

"Do you think Palimpsest will help? That it will show you how to be a _better_ person, in this world?"

"No." Lyudmila's hand tightened, turning her knuckles white. Her face took on the same shade, but it had nothing of smooth porcelain to it. Her anger was a mask of its own, one carved from ice. "No, I believe that was your idea."

Hester jerked away. For a moment, Lyudmila still clung to her hand. She let go abruptly, and Hester stumbled, catching herself against the wall. "I deserved that."

"Why?" Lyudmila asked.

Hester settled herself slowly to the floor, avoiding Lyudmila's eyes. "Because it hurt you. The city. It took Oleg from you. It doesn't hurt many people. Or maybe they just don't see it. Maybe they're blinded by the jewels and dances and colored lights. They want me to see those things, too. And I'm so tired of being alone. I wanted someone who would understand. Someone who knew what the city was, and how it hurt _me_."

"So we could grow old together, taking pills together, hiding from our dreams?"

Hester ran a hand through her wet hair and felt it form peaks and valleys in the wake of her fingers. "Something like that," she said hollowly. "I thought Oleg was that person, first. I thought Oleg was that person, and look at how that worked out, all neatly and tidily." She smiled downward, a savagely sarcastic twist of the lips that only the short-piled carpet saw.

"Always Oleg," said Lyudmila.

"No. No, I wanted you, too." She tipped her chin back, trying to catch Lyudmila's gaze. "Believe me, please."

"Because, how do you say? Your sins will be forgiven, if they were done for love?"

With a hissing sigh, Hester went back to studying the carpet.

"You were selfish," Lyudmila said. Hester made a tiny movement that might have been a shrug or a flinch. "So was I. I thought, 'Here is a grieving woman. She does not love me, but she sees in me someone else she does love. Perhaps I can borrow some of that for one night. Surely, if he is not coming back, it will hurt no one?' Stupid."

"Stupid," Hester agreed. Neither of them laughed.

"What I do not understand," Lyudmila said, "is why you fear the city so. I spoke with the grave-keeper, last night. Seven years, and he is still pining for your return. And I saw the dead. I touched their fingers, and they were cold and moist as dirt beneath frost. But they were not unhappy. They were not restless. And they did not object to being touched."

"Palimpsest is cruel," Hester told the carpet, her words thin and dry as a stream in drought. "I don't think it knows how not to be. It's like a child with its first bowl of goldfish. It doesn't know they need to be fed, or cleaned. It doesn't know they can't be touched. It doesn't know there are rules. It just knows what we want, and it knows if it gives us that, we will stay. Some of us," she added. "Some of us are too stupid. It shows us what we want, and we run away."

"And what is it you want?" Lyudmila asked, her voice suddenly unaccountably gentle.

Hester's hands trembled as she wiped her eyes dry. She reached one out to Lyudmila when she was done, and the other woman held it between her fingertips delicately, as though it were a butterfly's wing. "My parents, of course. I want to touch my parents, to talk to them, to hold their hands. To know them, so I can miss them, not just their shadows." The words were stark, simple. She had never let herself think them before. "And Palimpsest could give me that. Not exactly that, but something close. I'm afraid," Hester said slowly. "I'm not very strong. A whole city that wants me, a world where everything I dream of is possible, just because I dreamed it? How can you go, just to visit? And then come back here, to graves. It's _hard_, making your own meaning. It's so very hard. It would be so much easier just to stay. Even if it is cruel."

"Yes," Lyudmila mused. "It would be. I could vanish, and my children could go to their father. I do not think they would miss me, much."

"Oleg didn't think I would miss him," Hester said sharply.

"Perhaps I speak too strongly. But they would forget." She released Hester's hand and brought her fingers up to brush them across Hester's cheek. "As you are already forgetting Oleg."

Hester wanted to deny it, but could not find the words. They melted away like cotton candy on her tongue. "You'll just give in, then." she said instead, stiff and harsh as sandpaper. "You'll let Palimpsest win."

"Do you have a more clever plan?"

"Go home and try," Hester whispered. "Be stronger than I am."

Lyudmila's fingers closed around Hester's chin, tilting her face up so she could examine it. "You are going, then." She did not have to explain where she meant.

Hester thought fleetingly of the medicine bottles, lined up in her cabinet neat as soldiers. "Not today," she said, trying not to meet Lyudmila's eyes. "Not tomorrow. But I don't know how much longer I can fight." She sighed. "I could always take the other way. I tried once, you know. It disagreed with me."

"And why do you believe I can be stronger than you?"

"Because you are." Hester looked vaguely surprised. "You came here. You knew you didn't know how to be a family, so you came looking for yours. You wanted a cure for loneliness. You didn't stay in Moscow and let it, let it calcify."

"But I did not find my family. I found you."

"And what would you have us do? Grow old together, taking pills together, hiding from our dreams?" Hester parroted.

"Is there no middle road?"

"For people who are grounded, maybe. For people who have something to bind them here. But Palimpsest," she said fiercely, "Palimpsest _selects_ for loneliness. It told me that."

"Then perhaps we must learn to be less lonely."

"With each other?" Hester asked. "Two drunken nights with a stranger. That's the definition of loneliness, isn't it?"

"Perhaps it is good to start small. Perhaps it is good to practice, to build this small thing before I try to build a family."

"Of course," Hester said, tasting coffee grounds. "I'm a door to better things. More beautiful things."

"You are a stranger," Lyudmila corrected. "And I do not know where your door leads. But I should like to see you again, before I go."

Hester stood with a creak of her knees and moved to the bag where her clothes were neatly folded. She shook them out, moving with a slow precision that she hoped would not reveal how much her hands still trembled, and pulled them on. Her skirt was wrinkled, and she smoothed it nervously several times, stalling for time.

"I'll come," she said at last, and fled.

* * *

There were eight elevators in Hester's office building, each a miniature temple bedecked in chrome and hardwood. They rose and fell in two rows, facing each other but rarely settling on the same floor for long enough to do more than exchange a quick shiver of greeting. When Hester emerged from the leftmost one, Lyudmila was standing in front of her, watching women in skirt suits and men in tastefully decorated ties stream out of the opposite elevator.

Hester flinched back into the elevator before she could be seen, her hand moving to the pad to call for another floor. She rose two floors before she calmed herself enough to push the call button for the lobby, but by then the elevator's course had been set. It took long minutes for the elevator to inch its way, floor by floor, to the top of the building before returning to ground.

Lyudmila was still waiting. Hester took a breath and stepped out to greet her.

"I thought perhaps dinner would be appropriate," Lyudmila said. "It is traditional," she added, gravely, into the void left by Hester's taken-aback silence. "Besides, one must make the most of expense accounts. And it is my last night in New York."

"How did you find me?" Hester asked, still unsteady from surprise.

Lyudmila shrugged. "There were business cards in your purse."

"You went through my purse?"

A flicker of uncertainty crossed Lyudmila's face. "Ought I not to have?"

"Of course not," Hester snapped. She thought, protectively, of the orange bottles tucked away into its corners. But Lyudmila knew of them already. She took another breath and said, softly, "I'm glad that you're here."

It was not an apology, but then, Lyudmila had not offered one either. It was enough to prompt a hesitant smile from Lyudmila. Hester returned it in the same degree.

Together, they stepped out the double-paned glass doors into the city. It was raining again, a faint drizzle that caught the city's neon and turned the air into a colored haze. Lyudmila began to lead them left, but on impulse Hester caught her hand, drawing her up short. Lyudmila gave her an inquiring look.

"The concierge had recommended--"

"No. No, there's a place near--near my place. I'd like to show it to you."

Lyudmila nodded and called a cab with a slender, upraised arm crossed in stripes of blue and green light. They inched through traffic slowly, listening to the shrill horns and saying nothing. Hester still held Lyudmila's hand.

When they reached the restaurant, Hester realized before she walked in the door that the ownership had changed. Sleek metal bistro chairs, upended and drawn close beneath the awning to protect them from the rain, had replaced the casual plastic that once loitered outside the front door. The door itself was now paneled in pale wood and mirror glass, and the menu's vellum pages promised only a handful of dishes, each with their ingredients carefully delineated.

She tried to remember the last time she had come here, when it had served uncomplicated Italian on faded tablecloths. It had been a favorite, until a waiter with ears that stuck out like an elephant's had seen her mark. He had been in such a hurry to proposition her, he spilled her water glass on her head. She was grateful for that, at the time. It gave her the excuse she needed to escape.

That had been five years ago, perhaps, or six. She froze in the doorway, trying to think of another option, but she had no more recent memories to draw on.

"I'm sorry," she told Lyudmila. "It's different. Different than I remember. It's been so long since I went out. They find you everywhere, or it feels that way. They find you, and they want you. Not you, but what's on the other side. And they think you'll never say no. It's stupid, isn't it? I'm so afraid to lose the world I've already left it. There's an epigram for you."

Lyudmila squeezed her hand. "It has food, does it not?" Hester nodded. "Then it will do." She drew Hester in and followed the hostess to a narrow table beside the window. "A proposition," she said, once they had settled in place. "Let us not talk about 'them,' not for tonight. Let us not talk about my brother. We have done this backward, I think. We are two strangers, meeting. What do you suppose we might say?"

Hester looked up from the menu she had already buried her head in and forced herself to meet Lyudmila's gaze. "I suppose," she offered tentatively, "I'd start with my name. It's Hester." She felt like a fool. But Lyudmila smiled at her and extended a hand across the table, playing along.

"And I am Lyudmila. And what is it that you do?"

Hester found a smile, somewhere. It did not fit her face perfectly, but it spread as they spoke, a gentle rise and fall of voices that had nothing of ghosts in it, or of dreams.

* * *

The rain had let up by the time they finished dinner, and the walk to Hester's apartment was dry, except where gutters or tree limbs let a few captured drops fall. The city looked clean.

"I used to love the smell of rain," she told Lyudmila.

"And then?"

"And then I forgot I loved it." She thought she might be starting to remember.

They kissed in the narrow corridor outside her apartment, lips and tongues gliding against each other as lightly as the soft spring shower.

"Wait," she said, and pulled her keys from her purse, letting them in. The lock clicked shut behind them. Hester felt her eyes sliding past the sofa where she had once opened the way for Oleg and forced herself to look at it. The arm was torn, and the pillows that had covered it lay scattered on the floor. She had avoided looking at it for months, afraid of the memories it might bring. Now she stared at it, daring something to happen.

Nothing did, except that Lyudmila asked, "Is something wrong?"

"Nothing," Hester said, and led her through to the bedroom.

They started where they had left off, with light, fluttering kisses that brushed a cheek, an ear lobe, the line of a jaw. Each gesture was slow. Lyudmila unfastened Hester's shirt with the same deliberate pace, sliding a button free each time her lips pulled away. She stopped when she reached the last button and pulled away a few inches.

"I am not doing this for Palimpsest, for Oleg. I am doing this for you. For me. If you wish me to take your pills--"

"No," Hester said. She shrugged her shirt off her shoulders.

Lyudmila nodded once, and lifted her hands again to unbind Hester's breasts. She pressed her lips to what she found there. Hester took a small breath and closed her eyes.

She opened them only twice: once when the other woman's hand flexed inside her and she gave a low, keening cry, and once when they were finished, and Lyudmila had drifting off to sleep beside her. Hester watched her for a moment, then brushed a strand of short, blonde hair behind Lyudmila's ear and closed her eyes again to join her.

* * *

`The alley between counting houses is empty. Only the flames move. Hester watches them dance, mesmerized by the flickering shadows. This is not so bad. There is no death here, nor (if she ignores the glass, the workers passing coins from hand to hand just beyond the flames) an impossible, glittering world that will leave her heart aching. It is only fire. If it is sharper than the fire of her world, the colors a little brighter, the edges more stark, what of it?`

`It takes her some time to notice that one patch of shadows is constant. She stoops toward it, and sees the leather arabesques of the scorpion-man's glove, abandoned after yesterday's scuffle. Hesitantly, as though afraid it, too, will sting, she picks it up. `

`It does not fit her hand. She cradles it beneath one arm as she steps out of the alley. The curlicues of leather jut out in awkward places, scratching her elbow, the back of her neck. They would tangle in her hair if it were long enough.`

`The broad stretch of Archiloquy is not empty, but few people scurry down its sides. Perhaps it is later, or perhaps most are occupied in counting the latest shipment of coin. Hester walks slowly toward the trading house. Its doors are closed, but on the steps at their base sits a young woman with a peahen's crest for hair. Her eyes shift from blue to green to copper in the thin evening light. She watches Hester closely as she approaches.`

`"Hello," Hester says. She has more words to share, but the woman's heavy silence pushes them back, sealing them in her mouth. She proffers the glove silently. `

`The woman's eyes grow wide, showing depths of purest gold. She snatches the glove so fast that the leather snags on Hester's skin, slicing a thin line across her palm. Hester pulls it to her mouth reflexively and sucks at the wound. She watches the woman through her spread fingers.`

`Around the woman's neck hangs a sheet of slate. Trapped in its blue-gray grip are a dozen fossils, each more improbable than the last. Their curving antennae and segmented shells make a distracting background for the words that the peahen-woman slowly etches across the surface with a piece of chalk spiraled like a unicorn's horn. Hester struggles to make out the words, which are, in the end, disappointingly pedestrian: "Thank you."`

`An angry snort behind her draws her attention from the sign, and she spins too quickly. She can feel her feet slipping on the polished marble steps and she falls, rolling once, twice before she can catch herself. Pain shoots from her elbow, and a shallow scratch across her forehead joins her palm in shedding blood.`

`A man whose long legs bend backward and end in iron-shod hooves stands over her. Those hooves have left long scratch marks across the white marble slab three steps above her, where she so recently stood. One hoof scrapes the ground again, impatient to charge. But the peahen-woman is waving one arm wildly as she scratches at her slate, and the hoofed man reluctantly shifts his attention to her.`

`Hester stays sprawled across the ground, afraid to move. The man does not have a board, but makes do with snorts and whinnies and the flick of his long, thin tail to respond to the woman's scrawled remarks. At last, he turns back to Hester and takes two ringing steps across the marble. Hester curls in about herself, but it is only so that he can offer her a hand. His arms are stronger than human muscles ought to be.`

`"My father is sorry," writes the woman. "There was trouble, yesterday, and he does not trust immigrants. He is here to escort me home. I have told him you were only trying to help. I will give Vireak his glove tomorrow."`

`The hoofed man does not look sorry. He looks tense, impatient to be gone. Hester shivers, remembering the strength with which he pulled her to her feet with arms that look merely human, and thinks longingly of the pills in her purse. She regrets her bravado.`

`"It's all right," she says, at a loss, when it becomes clear the peahen-woman is waiting for her response.`

`"Will you join us for tea?" the woman writes. It is clear the man is not expecting this. Neither is Hester. But the woman writes on, heedless of his narrowed eyes and rumbling throat, of Hester's downturned lips. "It is the least we can do, after my father almost trampled you." She gives the man a stern look, and he grudgingly stops pawing at the ground.`

`Hester looks askance at him. Her instinct is to say no, to flee from these people who have admitted to wanting to do her violence. But she thinks of the previous night's scuffle and shivers. Violence will find her whether she seeks it or not.`

`She could go to the graveyard, of course, where the grave-keeper awaits her and the bamboo whispers promises into the breezy night. It is where she belongs, her destiny. If Oleg was brought to open the city's locks, then she was called to grieve for its dead. But she is afraid of both the dead themselves and their need for her. She does not want to go near them, and if she does she knows she may never leave.`

`So she nods. The woman beams at her, her crest trembling faintly from the excitement, and leads the way into the streets.`

`The house she shares with her father has paper-thin walls. The pages have been layered over each other and lacquered so many times it is difficult to make out precisely what is written upon them, but they are still thin enough to let the gray-green evening light filter through. Sound carries as well, of course, though there are no voices, only the clanks and rattles of pots and pans as the traders prepare their evening meals.`

`The older traders live in grander residences, up the gently sloping hill of Defalcation Avenue, mixed with others of the rentier class. Their houses are behind high walls, for they find hearing their neighbors' voices an affront; it reminds them of what they have lost, all they have willingly given up.`

`Few of the veterans who have taken up trading have the means for such grand abodes. Instead, they have built themselves a city on the far side of Palintocy Street, where an overzealous unit of termites once leveled three blocks of tenements during the war.`

`The veterans cannot afford to rebuild the tenements. Instead, they have build their homes from the money of Palimpsest's wartime years, from the paper slips in which their wages were paid punctiliously at the start of each month. At first their payment was a single slip, then twelve, then two hundred. By the end of the war they carted it out of the payroll office in bales. `

`Today, the money printed by Palimpsest's army is worth precisely nothing. But the veterans are grateful for the bales, which provided them with enough bills to build their homes. To an outsider, they each look alike, one boxy construction with walls as thin and tight as a drum after another. But the expert will see that the bills have been arranged, very precisely, so that the seals and colored shapes form patterns above the lintel. Some homes boast eagles or tigers; others simply show a moon, or sun, or star. `

`The hoofed man's home has only a single straight line, formed from the darkest portions of the lowest denomination bill. Curiously, because so few were printed before inflation rendered them worthless, that bill is now the rarest Palimpsest Army note. If any scrap of paper in the man's collection were worth anything, it would be those bills.`

`If he knows this, he does not show it as he pushes ahead of his daughter to be the first through the door. She gives Hester an apologetic look as he vanishes into the back of the house, past a beaded curtain strung with clipped and adulterated coins. `

`"My name is Nary," she writes. "Will you sit?" She clears a box and discarded scarf from room's finest chair, which has three legs and one arm, then steps away.`

`Her anxious regard makes Hester uneasy. She wonders if the grave-keeper has stopped waiting for her, if Palimpsest has found another piece of bait to dangle from its gilded hook.`

`"What do you need from me?" she asks sharply. She stays standing just inside the door.`

`The young woman's look is wounded. Her crest droops, casting one thin feather across her forehead as she bends her attention to her slate.`

`"I only want to thank you. Vireak will be very grateful to have his glove back."`

`Her father has emerged through the curtain behind her, bearing a bone tea tray with two matching cups and a third carved from wood. He reads the slate from over her shoulder and snorts and shies, splashing tea on the tray. A thin trickle spills over the edge and onto his hand.`

`"What is it?" Hester asks.`

`Nary casts a long glance over her shoulder, watching her father. When she returns her attention to Hester, her eyes are a cold, twilight blue. She writes slowly, "He does not think I should thank an immigrant for returning what an immigrant took away. But _I_ think you did not take it." Her last strokes are sharper, more scrawling. She looks at Hester hopefully.`

`"No. No, I didn't. Of course I didn't."`

`The man drops the tray onto a small table, sending more tea splashing over the edge, and reaches for Nary's board. For a moment, Hester thinks she means to cling to it, that there will be another fight for her to witness, and she flinches back toward the doorway. But Nary lets it go. In its place she picks up a cup of tea, which she cradles in her hands as he writes with coarse strokes that send shivers down Hester's neck. `

`"If you did nothing, why are you here?"`

`Hester looks at him blankly. "Do you think I had a choice?" But of course she has a choice. There are always drugs, always the option of staying contained, closed, of not opening herself up for Palimpsest.`

`His thin lips and narrowed eyes say he knows this, or at least that he knows that she is lying. Nary makes a small gesture toward the board, but he folds his large hands around it and scrawls, "You are not welcome here."`

`Nary's crest trembles, and she reaches out a hand toward Hester even as she shoots her father a sapphire-tinged glare. Without her slate she cannot plead in words, but her expression is clear enough.`

`Hester sways forward and back in the doorway, uncertain which command to heed. She cannot see a safe course here. "Why?" she asks the hoofed man, though she is looking at Nary. "Why do you hate me?" Her words come out a whisper, and for a moment she is not sure if he has heard. He is very still. Then the chalk begins to move again, and she watches, mesmerized, as each letter is formed.`

`"Because the city loves you immigrants. It doesn't love us. We are too acclimated, too _silent_." He scrapes the surface clean with one broad stroke of a hand and continues to write on the newly empty slate. "It loves you, with your striving, your amazement. Your sharp feelings."`

`"I didn't _ask_ for it to love me," Hester cries. "I didn't ask for it to want me. I was--" she chokes on "happy," on "content," on "whole." "I didn't know I was empty until it told me. I didn't want it. I never wanted it. I just want it to go away," she finishes, miserable, and wonders if she is lying again.`

`The hoofed man is unmoved. "You treat Palimpsest like a toy. You treat _us_ like toys. You do not care that we bleed. You think our customs are quaint. You do not care that they have meaning. They are rituals, they keep the city alive so that you can play in it. And it does not care. It loves _you_." He wipes the words away as soon as he is finished writing, and she is left looking at a blank piece of slate.`

`Hester licks her lips. "It's cruel to you," she whispers. "I thought it was just cruel to me."`

`He snorts contemptuously, dismissing her blindness with a flick of his tail, and writes nothing at all.`

`She steps away from the doorway and bends, very slowly, toward the table. She cannot quite let down her guard enough to look away from the hoofed man, but she manages to pick up the wooden cup without spilling more of it. It is already almost empty from all the spills and sloshes, but she sits in the one-armed chair and drinks the last two sips of pale green tea. It tastes like young spring shoots of bamboo.`

`"I am not Palimpsest. I can't make it less cruel to you. But I--can try. I can try to tell the other immigrants. To remind them that they are immigrants. Guests. To help them be less cruel." She puts the cup down on the tea-stained tray. "I know where they all live," she adds, meaning it to be bitter but not, quite, succeeding. "They've told me. They've given me their cards." `

`Nary smiles at her, a too-bright smile, but Hester is watching the man begin to write and does not see.`

* * *

The paint was peeling from Hester's ceiling. A single, long strip dangled over the bed like a flimsy sword of Damocles. She had watched it pull away, inch by inch, for years. Frowning, she stood on the bed and reached up to yank it free. It crumbled in her hand, shedding dust across her bare skin and making her sneeze. She brushed what she could onto the floor and then settled into the bed next to the still-sleeping Lyudmila, whose blonde hair spread across the pillow like a narrow corona.

Carefully, Hester reached out one arm and wrapped it around Lyudmila's waist. The scratch in her palm throbbed faintly as she stretched the skin, but the pain faded once her hand stilled. When the other woman did not awaken, she nestled closer, pressing thigh against thigh and chest against back. The warmth was soothing. She dozed for a time, perhaps a minute, perhaps ten, until she felt Lyudmila begin to stir.

Lyudmila rolled over, unexpectedly quick, and kissed her, a long, lingering kiss that left Hester's mind muddled. Lyudmila was more unflappable. She broke away slowly, ending with a few light nips at Hester's lips, but her words, once she had finished, were clear and direct.

"I met my brother," she said to Hester.

"And?" Hester asked, still flustered. Lyudmila said nothing. As the silence stretched and Hester's head cleared, it occurred to her that she might have misread the other woman. Lyudmila's hands were playing with the edge of the sheet, twisting it into knots. Hester reached out and laid her own hand over Lyudmila's, stilling them. "And did you fall in love with him?" she asked, trying for humor. It fell flat.

"No," Lyudmila said sharply. "No, I--" she turned a hand over, weaving her fingers through Hester's for strength. The cut, pulled at, bled a few drops, but Lyudmila did not notice and Hester said nothing. "He did not recognize me," she said. "He was kind." Her mouth dripped words slowly, like ice briefly warmed by the winter sun. "He said it was funny, that I should have the same name as his wife. Funny. I thought family should recognize one another, but he did not know me at all."

Hester remembered her conversation with the counting-house immigrant. She squeezed Lyudmila's hand and said quietly, "His quarto is his family now, I think. Maybe he can't remember the old one. Maybe he can only have one."

"Then I have none."

Hester gave her a sharp look. "You have your kids." She swallowed and added, "You have me. Maybe I can teach you what a family is like. Is supposed to be like. I've been out of practice, you know. For a very long time."

"We are strangers," Lyudmila reminded her.

"We could learn to be more, I think," Hester said. She traced the curve of Lyudmila's waist and hips with her free hand. "I promise I will not bring you cold deli coffee." Lyudmila smiled faintly at that, but the smile was a sad one.

"It would be very cold indeed, if you were to bring it to Moscow. We _are_ strangers, Hester. You cannot abandon your home for me. I cannot _be_ your home. I cannot be the one anchor that holds you back from Palimpsest."

"I wasn't asking you to be," Hester snapped. "I'm not offering to move to Russia. I have work to do, here." Her gaze drifted across the room to the desk drawer that hid her address book. "But I thought maybe I could visit. You said--you said it is good to start small, to practice."

"I speak from a position of no experience," Lyudmila reminded her. "And I am not being fair to you. I am pushing you away. It is what I do." She squeezed Hester's hand back. "I would like it, I think, for you to visit. Even if nothing comes of it."

"Even if," Hester agreed. The light through her windows was bright now, and the blinds cast slatted shadows across Lyudmila, ruling her skin like paper. Hester traced a finger along one line, though if she was spelling a word it was in no language she knew. "You said you had to leave today."

"Yes. My flight, it departs tonight."

"Do you have," Hester hesitated, "business today?"

"Yes," Lyudmila said. She reached for Hester before she could pull away. "But it is nothing," she added as she stroked the underside of Hester's wrist, "that cannot wait."

* * *

It was nearly noon when Lyudmila left. They kissed again at the door, gently, softly, and conducted a ritual exchange of cards. Hester's was a busy extravaganza of colors and logos, and it took tiny scratches of the pen to squeeze her personal number into the corner. Lyudmila's was more formal, with ample space left a virginal white. She filled it with her number, her address, a listing of her travel schedule, and made Hester promise to write as well as call.

"So I will have something to remember by," she said, pressing the card into Hester's uninjured hand. "Something to store beside my picture and my key. Something that is not a dream, a wisp of memory."

"All right," Hester said roughly. "All right." She was crying a little, and tried to hide it, until Lyudmila tipped her chin up with one finger. Hester gave her a watery smile. "Don't worry. I won't drown."

"You had better not," Lyudmila said, and kissed her again, first on her lips and then on her grazed forehead, before pulling away. The cut had stopped bleeding. Lyudmila cracked the door just widely enough to step outside, and let Hester swing it closed behind her.

The clock seemed louder in the empty apartment. Hester gave it a sour look and reached for the phone.

She dialed her assistant's number from memory and was grateful when it rang six times, uninterrupted, before dropping her into voicemail. She had no idea how she would answer her assistant's questions.

"Hi, Jane," she said, clearing her throat. "I won't be coming in today. I had some unexpected personal business to take care of. But I'll see you tomorrow."

There were things she should probably tell Jane to do, she knew, but they were very far from her mind. She left the message at that and let the phone click back onto the receiver.

Lyudmila's card was still in her hand. She set it on the desk, aligning its edges neatly with the corner, and reached for the bottom drawer. Buried beneath envelopes and locks, rulers and tape dispensers, was her battered address book.

Hester pulled it out, careful not to disturb the rest of the drawer, and riffled through until she reached an empty page on which to tape Lyudmila's card. She smoothed each piece of tape down before turning her attention to the verso. She had pasted Sunday's card there hastily, snatching a moment in between throwing on her clothes and rushing to work. It was crooked and bent, and she wondered for a moment if it was jealous of Lyudmila's card's obvious pride of place.

Then she shrugged, picked up her phone again, and dialed.

"Hello? This is Hester. We met--we met on Sunday. No, I haven't changed my mind. But I wanted," she stopped and swallowed, "I wanted to talk to you. Just talk."

When she put down the phone, she was shaking. _This has to get easier_, she told herself, and then turned a page and picked up the phone again.


End file.
